


mettle

by Lertsek



Category: NCT (Band), WAYV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Character Death, M/M, Mermaids, light gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:08:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29028471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lertsek/pseuds/Lertsek
Summary: You can trade for a lot of things on planet Valor, but even giving up your name is not enough to make someone come back to life.
Relationships: Dong Si Cheng | WinWin/Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul | Ten
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28
Collections: Challenge #4 — Awaken The World





	mettle

**Author's Note:**

> Please head the archive warnings and tags.

Unlike all other battlefields Ten has seen, the devastation at the eastern shores of Valor is not really a battlefield at all, it’s a massacre.

Valor has always been a melting pot for the unwanted and the wicked. Never before has it turned on itself though. For hundreds of years, it has had to defend itself against outside forces, almost having to yield during the war with the creatures from a planet they call Earth.

The grounds are rich, the meadows spread far, and the mines produce gold on Valor. It is a small planet in size but large in its value. It's banned from the pages of history books but always mentioned in the back catalogs as a warning.

It's a planet of trade with a sky clouded by birds and spaceships at any time of day. What can't be passed through the air gets carted from point A to point B in the mines. It's an intricate system, one that gets changed year in, year out. Valor has learned from its past mistakes after all. Even though the war with Earth is close to its 130th anniversary, the land has not forgotten how it shook from its explosives.

It's a planet of trade, but it doesn't trade for coin, or ammunition, or just because it feels like it. It never _just_ feels like it. It's not that good-hearted. Sometimes the back catalogs lie, often times when it comes to Valor, they do not.

Ten's mother traded her middle name away when she was eleven for a cow that died a week later. She learned from it and made a better trade when she was twenty-one, her last name for a child. Ten years later she traded her first name for a chance to start her life anew on a different planet. The fuel of the aircraft ran out only a couple of minutes after take off.

One could say it was a worse trade than the one for the cow, at least the animal had lasted a week. And she didn't pay for that trade with her life.

The first time Ten made a trade it was while falling through the air at 120 miles per hour. He took a page out of his mother's book and uttered his name for the very last time. He was aiming to save two people, but in the end only found himself alive. He had no last name to trade for a second life after all, his mother had already given that away for him to come into this world.

Sometimes Ten tries to remember his original name, tries to form his mouth around sound shapes his mind can't recall. The first syllable always slips away from his tongue before he can say it aloud, his hand won’t move when he tries to picture it in his mind and redirect it onto paper. It’s simply not his anymore. 

So he lives by the name he gave himself, and sometimes, sometimes he lives by the names others have given him. 

They are all abbreviations of one another, usually mentioned by mothers during bedtime stories to try and get their kids to sleep only to have them wonder howthis entity looks. Or his names are whispered by the left over customers in a tavern after a long night filled with strong liquor to gather the courage to try and pretend all the ghost stories shared over the course of the evening don’t have a hint of truth lying underneath them. 

It isn’t true that the red eyes in between the corn are evil. But that doesn’t mean that the green ones are kind. It is not a lie that the mermaids on the eastern shores of Valor protect eternal life, before most people find out what exactly they are protecting, it is simply too late for them. The Black Widow does not want to eat your heart raw or mutilate your tongue, he just slips you a coin in return for your name so you can pass on safely. 

Valor has never been kind to Ten, and yet he can’t help but lend its inhabitants a hand. It’s his job after all. 

Ten expected the beaches to be closed, barricaded with big fences and shock wires, some patrol. But maybe no aircrafts need to circle the premises to keep people at bay. Maybe there being no air traffic in this zone at all except for the clouds makes enough of a statement. 

There is no bird song, no rustle of the wind dragging along the sand, even Ten’s footsteps are muted. His left leg so quiet it’s almost as if it’s not made out of metal but flesh. 

Valor has never turned on itself, and yet. 

The first body Ten stumbles upon still looks so whole it feels like it could rise and dive right back into the sea. The skin is perfect, no sign of corrupted veins. And the tail, the tail is as bright as ever. Even with the rain beginning to pour and no hint of sunlight through the thick clouds, the tail of the mermaid shines. Ten has to avert his eyes. And then wills himself to look back because they deserve it. He has to give this to them. No one ordered him to come here, except for himself, and disobeying orders from his own mind usually doesn’t end well. 

He had expected to have to fight to even be able to come close to the beach. And yet there is nothing alive to plunge his sword into but the sand. 

Valor has never turned on itself, but what else has the power to poison an entire stroke of ocean. 

Ten walks through the corpses, trying to avoid stretched out limbs and fins. There is nothing about them that makes it seem like they were murdered from the inside out. But when Ten checks for breathing, there is none. He places his ear on a chest and can’t hear anything besides the rain falling around him. He looks into their eyes and can’t see anything besides the emptiness. 

The coins Ten carries in his pockets won’t do any good, something he knew before he came here, and yet it hurts way more now that he finds himself standing in the middle of that reality.

The rain turns from dripping to pouring. Ten gets to work. The bodies have been laying here for about a week, and there is no way all the poison has seeped out of the water yet. But Ten doesn’t care, his body is mostly metal anyway. Fingers traded for food and weapons. An arm when he got caught stealing when the fingers ran out. A leg that died from infection. He traded and traded until he could trade for metal parts to rebuild his body. 

There is still some flesh that he carries on the shell of himself, and if that gets poisoned, then that’s fate, Ten decides, and starts dragging the mermaids back into the sea. 

He cannot give them a safe passage to the afterlife, the dead can’t speak their names after all. But he can give them a proper burial instead of letting them rot away on wet sand. 

Ten checks the tails of the first couple of mermaids before he carries them back to the sea. It doesn’t seem like there were even attempts made to cut them off. Ten wonders if it’s because the people of Valor still don’t know the secret to eternal life, wonders if they still don’t know that the mermaids are not protecting anything but themselves. Or if there is just no one stupid enough to eat the tail of a mermaid who has been poisoned. Ten guesses it must be the first, otherwise the bodies would’ve probably been moved and the poison might’ve been tried to be extracted. People are foolish in their will to live forever after all. He himself knows all too well. 

The rain keeps pouring as Ten works on. When his mind tries to remind him that he knows some of the bodies here, that he can recall some of their laughter, some of their eating habits, and who exactly won the last Dolphin Racing Cup, he holds his breath and counts, only moving again when the memories have vanished. 

In the end, he finds Winwin under the body of another mermaid. He recognizes the slope of his back as soon as he lifts the other mermaid off. Ten promptly shuts his mind down, first focusing on getting the mermaid he is carrying off the shore and back into the water. 

When he finally crouches down next to Winwin’s body, Ten pretends the water on his face is only coming from the sky and not his own eyes. 

There was a promise Winwin forced Ten to make a long time ago, back when Ten still had both his human legs. When the day comes, Winwin had said, you will cut off my tail and you will eat it.It was always _when_ with Winwin, never _if._

Ten had at first thought his friend had been joking, but over the years he slowly learned Winwin took it very seriously. He would jokingly tell Ten he doesn’t love him, only to write him sappy love letters for a week straight till Ten shows his face again. But Winwin does not joke about death, and neither does he joke about life. 

_Then why won’t you give me your name,_ was the constant recurring question Ten would ask him. _If you are so sure it’s when and not if, why won’t you give me your name out of precaution._ Winwin’s answer had stayed the same throughout all the years they had known one another: _when it matters, you’ll know it._

Slowly Ten started wondering if maybe Winwin didn’t want to safely cross over into death. But deep down Ten knew it was Winwin’s way of asking Ten to trust him. And so Ten did. Rightfully so. 

When he turns Winwin’s body over his face is not the first thing Ten looks at, it’s his arm. In the middle of the dried up blood are twenty-six letters scratched into the skin by a fingernail. Ten pales when he reads the words they form and something in his brain shifts. Like a door he closed long ago gets unlocked. 

The letters of the first word roll off his tongue so smooth they seem to him like childhood friends he gets reunited with. The second word feels like something that has been out of reach his entire life, and finally his fingers have grown long enough to wrap around it.

Ten wants to curse at Winwin, and so he does. He pulls all the swear words that he knows out of his mouth and speaks them into Winwin’s skin. 

He will have to make peace with never learning his own lover's real name. But that’s okay, because Winwin has given him something back that might be even more valuable. 

In the end, Chittaphon takes a page out of his mother’s book and trades his last name, Leechaiyapornkul, to a coin he takes out of his right pocket. He places it under Winwin’s tongue and seals his mouth again with a kiss. 

He lets the sea reclaim Winwin’s body. Knows somewhere Winwin is cursing at him too for already having traded his last name away again, and maybe cursing even more for the fact that he does not keep the promise of cutting off Winwin’s tail and eating it. But Chittaphon does not want eternal life. 

Because when the time comes, he now has a name for himself to trade for a safe passage into death. 

Valor has never been kind to Ten, but maybe it can be kind to Chittaphon. 


End file.
